In the past more than 20 years, a mobile communication technology has been rapidly developed and brought enormous influence to people's lifestyles and work styles and each aspect of politics, economics and the like of the society. The human society enters the efficient information age, and service Application (APP) requirement of each aspect explosively grows, which brings great challenges to each aspect of frequency, technology, operation and the like of a future wireless mobile bandwidth system.
Along with enrichment of various Internet APPs, a third-party Service Provider (SP) has increasing requirements on information interaction and network personalization of a network operating company, and network capability exposure gradually becomes a mainstream of a future network technology. For example, there are part of delay-insensitive services in mobile services used by mobile individual users, industry users and SPs/Content Providers (CPs) at present, for example, services of software updating and downloading and music and video downloading, data traffic of these services is slightly high, and adopting normal data plans for transmission will cost more. In existing networks, a mobile data network presents the characteristic of obvious busyness and idleness non uniformity in terms of time and region, and there exist many idle resources in the network. A background traffic service may fully utilize these idle radio resources to make a network of an operating company fully utilized, simultaneously enable a user to enjoy very cheap traffic and make it possible for an SP/CP to distribute services and contents by virtue of low-cost background traffic channels, thereby promoting use of the user for mobile traffic and increasing data incomes of the operating company.
In the mobile Internet age, it has already been inevitable for operating companies to expose network capabilities. Over the years, pipeline resources and network advantages are always reasons why the operating companies keep core competitiveness. However, with the arrival of the 4th Generation (4G) and 5th Generation (5G) ages, rich Internet APPs gradually turn the operating companies into pure pipeline providers. Therefore, constructing a unified and open capability provision platform and reasonably expose capabilities of basic services, information and the like become keys for the operating companies to keep competitive in the future.
FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a capability exposure network architecture according to a related technology. As shown in FIG. 1, the network architecture may include the following parts.
A Mobile Network and Entity (MNE) includes: a control plane network element Mobility Management Entity (MME)/Serving General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), which is responsible for signaling control and mobility management; a user plane network element Packet Data Network Gateway (PGW)/Gateway GPRS Support Node (GGSN), which is responsible for bearer control and session management; a data plane network element Home Subscriber Server (HSS), which is responsible for subscription management of a user; a policy control network element Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF), which is responsible for making and transmission of a user Quality of Service (QoS) and charging policy; and other network elements.
A Capability Exposure Platform (CEP) is arranged to request a network for a network resource and information according to a requirement of a third party and provide differentiated service and a better user experience for the user, and is connected with each network element in the MNE respectively.
An APP server is arranged for the third party to provide rich and varied Internet service for the user. For example, APP1˜APPn in FIG. 1 are connected with the CEP through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
A Network Data Application System (NDAS) is arranged for network data service, including service of query, storage, updating, deletion and the like of network data. The network data may be static network data, for example, underlying network information (information of a network component, a network resource, a component capability, a network topology and the like), network information of an existing network (information of a network element capability, network element load condition, user number, network topology and the like of the existing network) and user subscription information, and may also include dynamic network data, for example, user context information.
A Network Orchestrator Function (NOF) entity is responsible for dynamic orchestration of the network and the network elements, and is connected between the NDAS and the MNE.
With adoption of the capability exposure network architecture, a mobile network externally exposes mobile network information and a mobile network capability in a unified manner through a service opening platform. Exposure objects includes a third-party APP, own APP of an operating company and the like.
FIG. 2 is an existing capability exposure flow. As shown in FIG. 2, the flow includes the following steps.
In step 101, an APP server is required to call an API from a service exposure platform according to own service flow. For example, a regional location user density API in a user track APP scenario is called.
In step 102, a CEP preforms APP layer protocol conversion, and parses information of a capability to be acquired from a mobile network from the API (that is, requirement adaptation is performed). For example, it is parsed that a third-party APP is required to acquire user density information of a certain geographic region.
In step 103, the CEP acquires network capability information from an MNE. The network capability information includes a required network resource and user information. For example, the user density information of the geographic region is requested to be acquired. For this request, the MNE applies for network resource updating, collects the network resource and the user information, and returns the network capability information (for example, a telecommunication capability, terminal information and a network state) to the CEP. For example, current user density information of a certain geographic location is returned to the CEP.
In 104, the CEP encapsulates the network capability information acquired by the MNE according to a requirement of the API, to form an adaptation result of API calling. For example, user density information of a specific regional location is encapsulated into API information which may be called by the APP server.
In 105, the CEP returns the adaptation result of the API to the APP server, and the APP server implements various APPs and provide differentiated service for users according to different API information acquired from a network side.
The capability exposure network architecture exposes the network capability to the third-party APP. The third-party APP may request for QoS parameter updating, charging policy regulation (for example, a third party is a paid-by-user services), user preference information acquisition and the like through the CEP.
However, the network architecture mainly has the following shortcomings. For capability exposure oriented to a future 5G requirement, a current capability exposure architecture may expose a network capability and network information of an existing network to a third party. When a requirement of the third party exceeds the capability of the existing network, the existing network cannot provide an enhanced network capability or network resource. For example, a current virtual operating company is required to regularly lease a dedicated small network, or a newly added SP requires an additional network component to provide differentiated service, the current capability exposure network architecture cannot meet a capability exposure requirement exceeding the capability of the existing network. Therefore, an additional requirement of a third-party APP, the virtual operating company and the SP on the capability of the existing network cannot be met.